If there’s one game franchise that’s had its ups and downs, it’s Destiny. Destiny held such a special place in my heart back when it first released. Until then, I hadn’t quite played anything like it. Bungie, leaving Microsoft’s Halo series to work on their own IP, massively impressed me with their fluid gameplay, their diverse (yet puddle deep) environments and their intriguing lore. I must have plugged over one thousand hours into that game, spanning its vanilla serving and its follow-up expansions. By and large, this excitement was shared.
Millions of players would log into Destiny every day, content in completing the same bounties over and over, farming the same four resources over and over, and completing daily and weekly activities, over and over. Though, it was the game’s raids that truly kept players in place. To this day I cant say that any raid comes quite as close to The Vault of Glass, but then, that’s probably because I favor the Vex above any other enemy in the game. Bungie’s following raids were decent, but nowhere near as engaging as the core game’s raid.
I’ve played every expansion to date in regards to Destiny, from The Dark Below, right up to the Rise of Iron. Speaking broadly about the post launch road-map, things were always a bit hit and miss. The Dark Below was exciting, yet very, very short. The same can be said about House of Wolves. At this point, many players including myself had grew tired of the grind, and then Bungie came back swinging with their largest expansion at that time; The Taken King. This expansion not only smashed expectations out of the park, it exceeded them.
The Taken King was the game’s first true cinematic experience, bringing with it a dark story, a plot that easily overshadowed the core game, and heaps of secrets and new lore logs to uncover. Sadly, this momentum was hit by Rise of Iron, an expansion that felt very much copy and paste. Though, it’s worth pointing out that much of the team at this point had moved focus onto Destiny 2, so this was somewhat easy to forgive. Nevertheless, Destiny’s full run was fairly impressive. Unfortunately, however, Destiny 2 slipped up, big time.
Much like the first game, Destiny 2 pulled in a lot of interest. Bungie had clearly taken all of fan feedback on board. The game offered a much deeper campaign in comparison to the first game, and heaps of larger and more interesting environments for players to explore. I gave the game a decent score upon release, stating that it was the direction that Bungie needed to follow. Did they do that? Sadly not. Destiny 2 was followed by two meager expansions; Curse of Osiris and Warmind – both of which were half-baked, underwhelming, and cheap.
Both of these expansions didn’t fare well with our score slider, that’s for sure. It had seemed like Bungie had fell back into their old “we know better” ways. Serving up content that was pricey, yet about as deep as a puddle in the Sahara. Mercifully, Bungie saw the decline in interest and much like The Taken King, came back stronger than ever with their latest expansion; Forsaken. Our very own Lloyd gave the expansion a mighty high nine out of ten. I haven’t played this myself, but going from his impressions, it seems to be the best yet.
The real question here, however, and the reason for this post, is to discuss how many chances this developer will get before they truly screw over their fan-base. This is twice they’ve made some pretty horrendous mistakes now, and rectifying those mistakes with the bulky expansion drops that fans wanted in the first place will only get them so far. What do you think? Have you, like me, fell off the bandwagon since Curse of Osiris and Warmind? Perhaps you’ve enjoyed them? Will the fan-base stick around if Bungie repeats this mistake a third time? Hit the comments to get involved.
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